Does a Protest's Size Matter? - The New York Times - 1 views
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The Women’s March on Saturday, which took place in cities and towns all across the United States (and around the world), may well have been the largest protest in American history. There were an estimated 3.5 million participants.
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After studying protests over the last two decades, I have to deliver some bad news: In the digital age, the size of a protest is no longer a reliable indicator of a movement’s strength.
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A protest does not have power just because many people get together in one place. Rather, a protest has power insofar as it signals the underlying capacity of the forces it represents.
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This article explains how protest work. I have always been thinking that protests are all about the number of people we can gather. The larger the population, the more powerful the protests are. However, I have never looked deep into the mechanism behind protests. I really like the analogy made in the article. The main purpose of a protest should be showing the potential strength the public have over the issues. If we don't do anything after the gathering, then the protest won't be power enough to influence the policy of the government because the government will know that we are actually not that firm on our position. The analogy I come up with is that our attendance can't reflect how much we learn in school. Attending the school doesn't ensure that we are taking away knowledge from school. Merely attending a protest doesn't mean we can put pressure on the government. --Sissi (1/29/2017)